MyMechanic exec looks to streamline maintenance for small fleets

The trucking industry faces mounting challenges in maintenance and roadside repair as operational costs soar and technician shortages persist.

According to an American Transportation Research Institute report, maintenance costs increased by 12% from 2021 to 2022, reaching 19.6 cents per mile, contributing to a record-high operational cost of $2.251 per mile. Adding to this strain are delays caused by parts shortages and extended truck trade cycles, with Class 8 trucks averaging over 6.35 years in service.

Against this backdrop, myMechanic has focused its app on maintenance and repair through an innovative platform that reduces downtime, enhances safety and provides real-time, GPS-enabled solutions for fleets and drivers. Newly appointed President James Lovekamp recently spoke with FreightWaves on persistent issues in maintenance and repair.

Lovekamp draws on his experience as a fleet manager to shed light on the inefficiencies drivers face during breakdowns. These inefficiencies ripple through supply chains, delaying freight, increasing costs for fleets and ultimately impacting consumers. MyMechanic’s platform directly addresses these challenges by connecting service providers and fleets in real time, enabling faster repairs and reducing the financial toll of breakdowns.

FREIGHTWAVES: From your experience as a fleet owner, what was the driver experience like when a vehicle broke down on the road?

LOVEKAMP: The worst thing, both for efficiency and safety, is the driver sitting on the side of the road.

First, they’re sitting on the side of the road or sometimes they’re stuck out in the [traffic] lane because there’s nowhere safe for them to park. Not only does it create a bad situation for them, creates a bad situation for everybody else on the road. It creates a lot of unnecessary chaos.

Also, during a breakdown, most of these guys are literally standing there on the side of the road, scrolling through Google to find the closest mechanic to them and will just start calling people.

You might have to call 15 people before you find somebody who’s willing to come out, but once that’s accomplished, you gotta hope you have a way to pay them.

Last comes cost. The average cost of a down piece of equipment is about $750 a day. … Who do you think is paying that?

At the end of the day, it’s the consumer, because all of that cost somehow is going to roll downhill.

This is why we are focused on simply wanting to help you get off the side of the road, because it’s going to reduce the cost to the shippers and the end consumer.

Not only do we get you off the side of the road faster, we just reduced your cost of what’s coming out of your pocket that could go to buying groceries for your family.

In the big picture, that’s the cycle that myMechanic is trying to solve and that this process or this program has the possibility to solve. In the long term, we see much larger cost savings, not just for the individual user, but for everybody who is a part of supply chains at the end of the day.

FREIGHTWAVES: What are some of the key challenges that fleets face when it comes to managing vehicle maintenance and repairs?

LOVEKAMP: Nobody [in tech] is really focused on the [maintenance and repair] service provider side. It has historically been, “Here’s a maintenance management platform. It’s online. You figure it out.”

The problem is there’s no true central point that connects all of these different operations of maintenance and shares that information with service providers. Service providers are not connected to fleets at all.

So when a service is needed, the providers have no idea of the actual GPS coordinates of the stranded driver and truck, and the driver does not know the actual GPS coordinates of the technician.

FREIGHTWAVES: How do these maintenance and repair challenges impact fleet operations?

LOVEKAMP: This creates a lot of efficiencies for both the driver and the service provider. With our technology, both service and fleet managers can see their workforce and can quickly route available technicians to a service job and fleet managers can get transparency into when that driver may be back on the road.

Without transparency, these operations can create a ripple effect and can eat into drivers’ drive time. When a fleet expects a truck to travel 400 miles today and now is only traveling 200 miles, it backs up the entire supply chain. Fleets also start getting fined [for being late] and the full chain goes into chaos because freight is not where it’s supposed to be.

FREIGHTWAVES: How does the myMechanic platform aim to address these fleet management and repair challenges?

LOVEKAMP: First and most importantly, myMechanic has true, real-time GPS in our platform of where the driver broke down. [For technical service providers], your technicians have true GPS coordinates as well. So while a manager is looking at a map in our solution, you can see a technician is literally 3 miles down the road from a broke-down driver. As a driver, I can see how close the technician is and confidently know that he can be to me in 20 or 30 minutes.

This creates a lot of efficiency. Drivers can now relay to dispatchers on how long they plan to be down, and all parties involved with the shipment will have real transparency into a transit issue. Let’s stop the drivers that are the technicians that are driving back and forth across DFW, and let’s find the guy who’s five minutes down the road who can do the job and get the driver back on the road.

We also provide a way for secure payments to be done through the app. So if you’re an owner-operator, you have to worry about giving somebody your credit card number over the phone or having to find some way to get cash.

FREIGHTWAVES: What are the long-term implications of a myMechanic solution?

LOVEKAMP: I am excited to find ways to give the trucking industry an advantage. These solutions will help level the playfield for owner-operators competing with large carriers in this space.

Those are the people that built this industry. And unfortunately, over the years, because of the direction that technology has gone in the trucking industry, those people have been left behind. If you are running a small shop, you can’t afford to go out and pay $1,000 a month for a shop management system. If you’re a fleet manager for five trucks, you can’t afford to go out and pay thousands a month to have a maintenance system to manage the maintenance on your fleet.

The myMechanic platform is designed to help those people. We want to give the same capabilities to the mom and pop shops that we want to give to the big fleets, because they have the right, just like everybody else, to do the best that they can and make a living.

The fact that this product is doing that work is what gave me confidence to take this next step in my career.